The shores of recovery

Much remains to be done, but signs of revival are everywhere

THE hand-scrawled signs advertise houses for sale, boats for sale, garage sales. There are fresh strawberries, fresh eggs, fresh shrimp and crayfish, either fresh or boiled. Other families are selling heifers, chicks and rabbits. These are the traditional products of the small towns in south Louisiana, sold along narrow roads that wend their way through land so low it seems to sag into the water. But there is something new on offer to workers totting up their recent losses: signs are popping up saying “Spill Claims Denied?”

It has been a year since the blowout at Deepwater Horizon, an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico some 50 miles from south-east Louisiana. Eleven workers were killed and the platform burned for two days before it sank to the sea floor, 5,000 feet below. Oil gushed from the well for 87 days. Workers at the rig tried to contain it, while responders scrambled to corral it, burn it or disperse it. By the time the well was capped, on July 15th, the government estimates that nearly 5m barrels of oil had escaped, making the disaster the largest accidental offshore oil spill in history. Vast tracts of fisheries were closed. People who drew their livings from the waters, by fishing or tourism, feared devastation.

A year on, it is too early for a full account of the long-term impact. The Natural Resource Damage Assessment, a process mandated for oil spills, is still in its injury-assessment and restoration-planning phase. Detailed research into what happened and what it means awaits the full flowering of the Gulf Research Initiative, independently managed but to be paid for by BP to the tune of $500m over ten years. So far $40m of this has been dispensed, and requests for proposals on how to spend a fair chunk of the rest may be announced as soon as the end of April.

But though much remains to be done, many experts are willing to hazard a certain amount of relief. “Oh, it's a lot better than what we expected,” says Ken Litzenberger, the project manager for the Southeast Louisiana National Wildlife Refuge. “When you have that much oil spewing for that long—everyone was predicting doomsday.” Thomas Shirley of Texas A&M University says that favourable currents, an absence of storms that would have driven oil deeper into the fragile marshes and the remarkable appetite for hydrocarbons displayed by the Gulf's bacteria have saved a lot of the shoreline.

Add to that good fortune the fact that some of the grimmest prospects held out last year were simply exaggerated, and that others were fended off by an aggressive response that involved nearly 50,000 people from state, federal, and local agencies. One technological innovation for cleaning the marshes has a grasping claw to pull up mats of dead marsh grass and a squeegee to scrape the oil from the surface underneath. Another works like a giant set of hedge clippers. Some workers were stationed in the marshes, where they used bangers to scare birds away from oil-slicked sites. Others built chevrons of plastic booms to block the oil from coming ashore. All these efforts will eventually be paid for by BP, the oil company which was operating Deepwater Horizon and is financially responsible for the damages.

Offshore workers and responders captured or dispersed more than 2m barrels of oil, according to the most recent estimate from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA): about 40% of the total spill, according to government estimates. (BP has indicated that it may contest those estimates at some point, but has not yet released an alternative accounting.) Roughly 17% of the government total was recovered at the site; smaller shares were burned or skimmed off at the surface. Natural and chemically accelerated dispersion into small droplets has accounted for about 30% of the total. Nearly a quarter has evaporated—that hot Gulf sun has its uses—or dissolved.

According to the NOAA, about a quarter of the oil remains unaccounted for. Some of it became entrained with sand and the sediment coalesced into mats that will stay submerged until they are weathered by the water or spotted by the Coast Guard. Other bits of it are being coughed up as tar balls.

What it cost

The disaster is still having tangible effects. The last affected fisheries did not reopen until April 19th. On the beach at Grand Isle, Dan Lauer, a Coast Guard commander and the deputy incident commander for the joint effort, says that the service will clean up the symptoms for as long as it takes. “It's the cost of doing business in an active area,” he says, watching as trucks rake the shoreline.

Others are concerned about consequences far beyond the reach of rakes. Some scientific studies report a lot of oil still in the deep sea, possibly poisoning deepwater corals and other creatures. Damage to the deeps may have some effect on food chains elsewhere in the ocean that matter more to fishermen—most deepwater species visit the shallows in their larval form, and many of the larvae get eaten— but it is by its nature less noticeable, and emotive, than seabirds or turtles drenched in similar amounts of oil.

The ability of some ecosystems to clean themselves up can also cause knock-on problems. When bacteria eat up oil—which they have been doing at the Gulf's oily seeps for millions of years—they use up oxygen, too. Give them a huge oil blowout, and they can use up enough oxygen to create anoxic “dead zones” that imperil fish and other sea creatures. The NOAA is monitoring these zones; it is easier to test for low oxygen levels than to find the oil plumes far below the surface.

Some human interventions also caused collateral damage. “As part of the response you're going to have to injure the environment,” says Gary Petrae, the scientific support co-ordinator for NOAA. Chemical dispersants helped break up the oil, but some local residents and doctors are concerned about the long-term health effects of exposure to the dispersants themselves. Then there are the oyster beds. To flush the oil away from the coastline all constraints on the flow of the Mississippi were lifted, and a tongue of fresh water flowed out into the Gulf: good for the marshes, bad for the oysters, which need their salt. BP says it will not pay to reseed the oyster beds, as it never agreed to the freshwater flushing, and the oysters would have survived the oil.

It is paying for a lot else, though. Although it is hard to tot up the company's ultimate liabilities while the assessments are still under way, it incurred $13.6 billion in response costs in 2010 and has agreed to put $20 billion in an escrow fund, to pay damages to individual claimants for business losses and to state and local governments for clean-up efforts. According to ProPublica, a non-profit corporation that sponsors investigative reporting, a new breed of “spillionaires” has emerged in the Gulf, most of them companies subcontracted to help with the clean-up, who charged BP premium rates for any land rental or piece of equipment. But they are vastly outnumbered by those who are making claims against BP for business losses. These losses must be carefully documented—both to prove that they occurred, and that they were caused by the spill rather than by the recession, or anything else. “On any individual claim, we don't answer to BP. We decide,” says Ken Feinberg, who runs the Gulf Coast Claims Facility. On the matter of oysters, he says the fishermen will be paid as long as they can document their losses from the spill. As of this week, the fund had paid out $4 billion in claims to 200,000 people.

Some of these victims are relatively sanguine. The Gulf coast's economic ecosystem is built around energy, seafood and tourism, and for at least two the prospects are not bad (see article). Fish stocks have been invigorated by the fishery closures, and the moratorium on oil-drilling in the area has been lifted. “If the people in the oilfield go to work, then they can buy the shrimp, so they're helping us,” says Jay Riley, a shrimp fisherman from Plaquemines Parish. He says that the spill put him out of work for months, and he received about $41,000 in damages. It was a fair payment, in his view.

Tourism officials are less sanguine. All those doomsday predictions helped galvanise the response, and that has helped the Gulf coast recover. But they may also have led to a lasting perception that the shore has been ruined. And it will take more than home-made billboards on bayou byways to get the cheerier message out.